The commanding officers might refer to the spectacle as a mighty fine sight, but the few civilians with the fleet shared the sentiment of a tar who sidled up to the Sun man and said: "This makes you proud of your country. You know already that the country is big and great and all that, but when you see it reduced to this kind of business on the ocean you are sure your country is great. None but a great country could produce such a sight as this. I'm glad I've had the chance to see it." In single file for two hours the ships kept on their course. They were like so many Indians on a jaunt. Each ship stood for sovereignty. Each stood for brute strength. Each stood for the development of science and skill. Each stood for an impressive expression of patriotism. In that fleet of sixteen ships there seemed to be concentrated, according to some of those who looked at them, the entire power of the United States for good or evil. When it came to estimating the brute strength of the fleet it grew bewildering. The mathematicians got busy. They figured out that there were nearly 1,000 guns of various kinds on the entire fleet and they talked about the weight of projectiles and charges and then got down to muzzle velocity in foot seconds and muzzle energy in foot tons and a lot of other terms that would make a landlubber's head dizzy. They told how the average muzzle velocity of those guns was 2,700 feet a second and that a 13-inch gun's energy was equal to raising 31,372 tons a foot, while that of a 12-inch gun, with which these ships are all armed, could lift, by the power of one discharge, 44,025 tons a foot. Then they got to figuring out how much all the guns could lift and how swift the things they shoot could go. This ran the figures up into the millions of foot tons just for one discharge. When some one tried to figure out how many millions upon millions of foot tons could be raised if all the projectiles in the fleet were fired--the exact number of the thousands upon thousands of these projectiles it would not be prudent even to indicate--why, an amateur at figures, the simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division man, got a headache. Then the figure sharps got after the engine power, and they tried to show if one ship had something like 15,000 horse-power, more or less, what the combined ships must have and what could be done with it on land--that is, how many railroad trains, each a mile long, could be pulled so many thousands of miles; how many bridges like those across the East River they could pull down with just one tug at them; how many cities such power could light; how many great factories and mills could be run with that power, and even how much goods could be made out of it--well, after that the amateur began to wonder if he could add up two and two.